Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

“Marlowe?”

“The monster just went to four gees, too, Captain,” the other reported. “At current course… intercept in just over two hours.”

“Don’t get overconfident—we’ve seen it do seven gees,” Ferrol warned them. “I’d guess it’s taking its time because it’s not very hungry.”

“We’ll take any small favors we can get,” Roman said. “I take it the—shark?—is a predator?”

Ferrol snorted. “In capital letters, underlined. We got a look at the space horse it’d been feeding on. Or what was left of it.”

“We’ve got some recordings, Captain,” Kennedy added. “They’re not very good, but they’ll give you some idea of what you’re up against.”

“Good. Transmit whenever you’re ready.”

The indicator light went on, then off, and for a few minutes there was silence. “I see what you mean,” Roman acknowledged at last. “I’ll send it down to the survey section, see what they can dig out of it. You have any other recommendations?”

Ferrol licked at his upper lip. “We almost certainly can’t kill the shark, sir,” he said. “The Amity hasn’t got anything that could take out even another spacecraft, let alone something that kills and eats space horses for a living. Our only chance is to try and get rid of these vultures and their optical nets long enough to Jump.” He glanced at Kennedy. “Kennedy’s come up with one possible method. Now that we know where we are and how to get back, I think it’s time we gave it a try.”

“The rough design specs are in the package I just sent you,” Kennedy added.

“Hang on, let me take a look.”

For a minute the carrier was silent. Kennedy took the opportunity to finish the last details of programming for her missile. Ferrol sat and watched her, wishing he had something useful to do, too. “Interesting idea,” Roman grunted at last. “Yes, I agree there’s no point in waiting. Let’s see… if it works, try for Deneb. Give us two hours to catch up with you; if we don’t show, your new nav pack should have enough to get you back to Solomon.”

“Kennedy?” Ferrol murmured.

She nodded. “Deneb it is, Captain,” she called.

“Give us a continual helm dump,” Roman instructed. “If it works, we’ll want to see how. Good luck.”

“Right.” Ferrol took a careful breath. “Let’s do it, Kennedy.”

She nodded. “Move us out,” she ordered Wwis-khaa, who had taken Sso-ngu‘s place under the helmet. “Turn Quentin about thirty degrees port, seventeen nadir—big bluish star standing all alone.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

A minute later Quentin was in position, at least as well as Wwis-khaa could tell with the vultures’ interference. “Missile ready,” Ferrol read off, mentally crossing his fingers. “Okay, Kennedy—fire.”

With a flash of maneuvering fire their creation crawled away from the lander. A

minute later, the low-level fusion drive kicked in, sending the missile leaping outward like a scalded bat. It streaked past Quentin as Wwis-khaa twitched the calf aside; then, with the delicacy of a surgeon, the Tampy turned Quentin back again until the optical net was directly in line with the oncoming missile. Ferrol held his breath… and a second before impact the miniature star suddenly blossomed into a filigree of space horse webbing. At five hundred meters per second the humanrigged net collided with the vultures’ optical one—

“Wwis-khaa!” Ferrol snapped, his eyes on the displays. “Do it!”

“Quentinninni cannot yet see the star,” the Tampy said.

“Damn!” Ferrol slammed an impotent fist onto the edge of the console, watching helplessly as the webbing swept through the mess of vultures without obvious effect. “It’s not working. It’s not working.”

“I see the problem,” Kennedy told him. “The webbing caught a bunch of them, all right, but before it could drag them clear the rest filled in the hole.”

Ferrol hissed between his teeth. “Yeah. Damn. And now they’re wriggling out the open end and going back to the main swarm. We need three or four missiles, or one really big one, to make this work.”

“And a way to seal the end after it’s collected them,” Kennedy added. “You copying all this, Amity?”

“We got it all,” Roman acknowledged. “I think you’ve got the right idea; we’ll see if engineering and Tenzing’s people can improve on the model. Hopefully before the shark catches up with us.”

Which would be fine for the Amity, Ferrol thought. But for them… “We’ve already used all the webbing we had aboard, Captain,” he told Roman.

“I assumed that,” the other said. “We’ll think of something.”

“For starters,” Kennedy said, “there’s no real point any more in our skulking around out here. Recommend we head in and meet you halfway.”

Roman seemed to ponder that. “That’ll bring Quentin in uncomfortably close to the shark,” he pointed out. “Are you sure you want to risk that?”

“It’s a damn sight better risk than hoping you can outrun the shark the whole way here,” Ferrol countered.

“Point,” the other conceded. “Yamoto?”

“Ready, sir,” was Yamoto’s prompt reply. “Lieutenant?”

“Go,” Kennedy told her. Again the incoming-data light flicked on and off. “Got it.”

“Good,” Roman said. “Looks like a rendezvous of… an hour fifty minutes.”

With the projected shark intercept at just under two hours away. “Pretty tight,”

Ferrol grunted. “Especially if the shark decides to speed up.”

“Yes, well, Man o’ War can do six gees if necessary,” Roman reminded him.

And the shark could do seven… “There’s one more thing you should do, Captain,”

Ferrol said, the words coming out with difficulty. “In the underbed storage of my cabin is a lockbox—combination seven-two-seven-three-three. In it is a datapack—” he braced himself—“that shows the effects of excessive radiation and heat on space horses. If the shark’s physiology is similar enough, the data may give you a handle on how to fight it.”

He held his breath, waiting with dread for the obvious question. But Roman had a better sense of priorities than that. “Thank you, Commander; I’ll get it to the survey section right away,” he said. “Let’s hope it helps.”

Ferrol nodded silently at the console, a hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach.

So much for secret politics and secret weapons, he thought blackly. But this was a matter of survival—his and Amity’s both. Just for once, politics could go to hell.

And if the Senator didn’t like it, he could go to hell, too.

Four gees meant four times normal weight, which meant Amity’s scientists had to work from acceleration couches, which in the past had usually prompted bitter complaints and long delays. But for once there were no complaints; and in less than half an hour the preliminary reports began coming in.

“It’s two thousand fifteen meters long,” Tenzing told Roman, the intercom screen showing a familiar tapered-cylinder shape. “About two and a half times the length of the average space horse, with similar proportions. Sensory clusters are arranged in similar axial rings fore and aft, though from the diameter of each cluster it appears that the feeding orifices are proportionally much larger than those of space horses.” The diagram vanished, replaced by Tenzing’s drawn face.

Roman grimaced. “So if current theory is right about telekene strength scaling with volume, we’re talking a creature fifteen times stronger than Man o’ War.”

Tenzing nodded heavily. “We can hope it’s not that bad, but it’s certainly bad enough. The lander’s data proves that much.”